Project Sammaan : Tackling Urban India’s Sanitation Crisis

The Challenge of Urban Sanitation in India 

Project Sammaan was a large-scale infrastructure and research initiative to improve the end-user experience in India’s urban slum community sanitation ecosystem by providing facilities designed to take into consideration end-user needs and habits, and feature business models, pricing, and Operations & Maintenance practices to help ensure long-term desirability, use, viability, and sustainability. This piloting-at-scale initiative involves the construction of over 100 facilities in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack and a multi-year quantitative research component will validate the interventions being experimented with, prior to expanding the initiative to other Indian cities, and beyond. Learnings from the project will be captured and shared in a toolkit.

Project Sammaan was essentially the implementation phase of Quicksand’s in-depth, design research engagement the Potty Project, which was a year-long qualitative analysis of the sanitation ecosystem in India’s urban slums. Learnings and insights from this study directed the design efforts of the proposed facilities, as well as provided the foundation for engaging with end-users to account for their preferences and perceptions around sanitation practices.

Implementation and Human-Centred Design 

Quicksand carried out the role of day-to-day project management and directed the efforts of the Hardware design teams. This included interfacing with government officials to obtain land and necessary approvals, working with an architectural firm to design the facilities themselves, directing the efforts of a community engagement organization for behavioral change activities, and engaging with a branding and communications firm to develop the identity and signage for the facilities, all while ensuring that activities were predicated on human-centered design principles.

Additionally, there was a considerable communications mandate within the grant that Quicksand had ownership of. A dedicated website and blog shared learnings and experiences nearly in real time, a series of films were produced to further share project milestones, the team presented the work at conferences and other forums, and we also engaged with a team from Yale University to document the initiative for use by its business school as an innovation case study.